Influencer marketing is working with people who have an engaged audience, such as LinkedIn creators, YouTubers, newsletter writers or podcasters, to feature your product. In B2B SaaS, the most useful creators are often practitioners with modest but highly relevant followings, rather than celebrities. Deals range from one sponsored post to long-term creator partnerships and co-created content.
Choosing creators
- Audience fit: do their followers match your buyers by role and company type?
- Credibility: do they actually work in the field, and would they plausibly use your product?
- Engagement quality: substantive comments from real practitioners, not just counts.
- Format: can they show the product in use, through a demo, tutorial or teardown?
Structuring the partnership
Give creators the product, context and freedom to describe it in their own words; scripted reads tend to sound like ads. Agree on deliverables, timing, usage rights (can you run their content as ads?), and how results will be tracked, such as a unique link, code or landing page. Longer partnerships usually feel more genuine than one-off mentions.
Disclosure and measurement
The FTC’s Endorsement Guides, updated in 2023, require clear disclosure of material connections in the US, and many other countries have similar rules. Most platforms also offer built-in paid partnership labels.
Attribution is imperfect: many people hear about you from a creator and later search your name. Combine tracked links with self-reported attribution and branded search trends.
Example
A practitioner creator
Hypothetical company Tidewick sells a tool for revenue operations teams. It partners with a RevOps practitioner who posts weekly on LinkedIn, for a three-month series where she rebuilds her own reporting with the product and shares honest notes, including what she did not like.
Common mistakes
Choosing by follower count
A large general audience often converts worse than a small specialist one. Check who follows the creator.
Questions
Yes. Disclosure rules apply on every platform. Use clear language and any built-in labels the platform provides.
